Morning Must Reads: November 18

In the News: Bitcoin goes to Washington, Nancy Pelosi: Dems will 'Stand Tall' in Support of Obamacare during the next election, Iran nuclear talks heading to Geneva, and the Cheney family feud over gay marriage

“Busted website, canceled policies, lousy early enrollment numbers. And that could be just the warmup.Because the lesson of the last six weeks is that when it comes to the Obamacare rollout, if it can go wrong, it probably will.” [Politico]

Upcoming Battle will Showcase Rising Power of Women in the Senate: “Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) are leading opposing sides of a months-long disagreement over how the Defense Department should handle the reported rise of sexual assault in the ranks.” [Washington Post]

Maria Bartiromo is leaving CNBC ...for FOX Biz Network. Whether one likes or dislikes her work, going to FOX is simply a bad move, no matter the pay raise. It's not just the ick factor of FOX, but that network has a much smaller audience. If she thinks folks en masse will migrate to FBN and raise them to new heights, think again. Hell, I don't even get that channel in my cable package, would have to pay more for it, and that's not going to happen.

Peter Orszag has a great column out about New Zealand,
which is really about the right way for political authorities to think
about bubble concerns. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand had gotten
worried about skyrocketing house prices. The basic concern about
"bubbles" and financial stability that central banks are often
encouraged to use as a pretext for tighter monetary policy. But instead
of tight money, the Reserve Bank has responded with tighter mortgage regulation—basically requiring larger downpayments for most mortgages.

That limits the downside risk to the economy if house prices do crash
in the future. And it might even restrain future price appreciation.
But it doesn't try to "prick" a bubble by creating more unemployment.
That's the way it should be done.

It’s sort of easy being against the ACA and rooting for its failure when you’re sitting in a job that’s giving you decent health insurance. I think that’s what bugs me the most. How people with insurance—with no skin in the game where their healthcare is concerned or the healthcare for their spouses and children—are wanting the ACA to go away. So that what? So that other people don’t have access to the same privilege you currently have?

That's also what Canada did. I think Harper went through three iterations of tightening mortgage rules and we're now down to 25 year cap and minimum 10% down. Strangely, though, while it heavily cooled the bubble, it's started inflating again in the west - which is starting to drive me nuts. At some point, it will burst - we saw a small one burst in Alberta less than a decade ago (my Dad bought his condo on the downslope while my sister-in-law bought right at the peak)

Punishing the bank execs and traders who ruined everything - as in banishing them to the Graybar Hotel - would be another crazy idea to explore. Everyday people who rob banks go to prison. When banks do the robbing, they get TARP and fines, if that.

Well, that's partly because your banks actually collapsed. We suffered the same dot com bubble you did and prior to that, we had a gold bubble that exploded and wiped out a bunch of people. Some of our banks were even holding some of the CDO garbage when it collapsed. We survived 2008 primarily because we're regulated in such a way that we couldn't be leveraged 40:1 and be taken down by a stiff breeze.

I love how they can't admit they're wingers. I'm a liberal - very liberal - and nothing about that bothers me. I don't deny it when people call me a liberal and pretend to be "independent". It seems to suggest they're ashamed deep down about their political beliefs, or they know that merely being associated with their ideology these days is embarrassing.

Yup, Openminded and Colli, two neo neutral independents who just happen to be obsessed about Obama, spout every single idiotic 'winger theory and idea and use the word lib or libs as often as smurf smurfs the smurfing smurfer.